On Track to the Object 261

For the past two weeks now, the on track event has been going on for the Object 261 which is a Soviet artillery.  I have been scrambling to try and get on track with this event because this SPG has a really great gun on it.  In order to get on track, I raced through the grind on the KV-2 which is a Heavy Tank.  Yes, this artillery partially comes as a successor to a heavy line.  Currently, I have the tier seven S-51.  I'm still 40,000 experience from getting out of the stock gun and it seems to be a very slow grind.  The S-51's gun arc is more like a shotgun pass in football compared with other artillery which have a higher arc such as the US and British artillery that I have played.  So, the S-51 has come as a challenge to me as I have not been used to the inaccuracy of the Soviet guns.  Most of the time when it misses, it seems to go long which is extremely odd since it seems to come down at such an acute angle.  I can literally imagine the shell just passing right over the tank each miss.  As the grind is slow, I do not expect to get anywhere near the tier 8 arty as I would need well over 100,000 experience beyond the top gun.  So, I will be figuring out how to improve my performance with this tank through the rest of the week. 

S-51:

 http://th09.deviantart.net/fs70/PRE/f/2010/322/8/9/s_51_by_zanng-d333a3h.jpg

Object 261:

http://worldoftanksxbox360edition.com/dcont/fb/image/obj261-2-branded_1.jpg